Thus, we hear again and again about how “the rich” are “taking” too high a percentage of “national income.” The reformers want people to think that they are being victimized by greedy plutocrats, thereby engendering support for more governmental activism. What they don’t want people to understand is that when highly productive people earn (not “take”) more, they are adding to prosperity, not depriving others of anything.

by George Leef

Now 93, Thomas Sowell continues to produce excellent work — work that would help the United States escape from the grip of statism if people would heed him. Sowell has just published a new book, Social Justice Fallacies, and it contains a wealth of common sense about that terrible menace to freedom and prosperity, namely the Left’s demand that we transform the country to conform to its concept of “social justice.”

The obsession with equality

The central obsession of the Left is with equality. Their complaints about a free, truly liberal society usually stem from the fact that freedom doesn’t result in equality, therefore requiring that government employ coercion to bring it about. In the past, those people, who misleadingly call themselves “progressives,” insisted that government power be employed to ensure equal opportunity for individuals. But after decades of government efforts aimed at that, the progressives have taken to demanding equality of outcomes for favored groups. To that idea, Sowell responds,

In the real world, there is seldom anything resembling the equal outcomes that might be expected if all factors affecting outcomes were the same for everyone…. People from different backgrounds do not necessarily even want to do the same things, much less invest their time and energies into development the same kinds of skills and talents.

He’s right, of course. The world is not geared for equality, and most human beings are content with that fact. As he always does, Sowell supplies plenty of evidence to support his point. For example, in 1912 in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which was ruled by Turks, there were no Turks among the city’s stockbrokers. That “inequality” was not because Turks were kept out but because the field didn’t appeal to them, so it was dominated by “outsiders.” No one minded that.

What about inequality between men and women? Statists have successfully demanded equal-pay laws, but as Sowell argues, no such laws were ever needed in a labor market with free competition. “As far back as 1971,” he observes, “single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since leaving school were earning slightly more than men of the same description.” Such facts, however, never deter statists from insisting on coercive “solutions.”

The excuse of “institutional racism”

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